The written form of Standard German (Hochdeutsch) was created at the II Spelling Conference held in Berlin from 17 to 19 July 1901. The desire to create a single German language was especially evident after the creation of the German Empire in 1871. In 1876, on the initiative of the Prussian Minister of Culture Aldaberk Falk, the I Spelling Conference was convened, at which “negotiations towards a greater agreement in spelling” were held. However, it was not possible to agree on a uniform spelling of the Reich.
In 1879 Bavaria published its spelling rules for the German language. Austria in the same year introduced its own - "Heisesche corps", named after their creator Johann Christian August Heise. In 1880, Prussia introduced its own rules developed by Wilhelm Wilmann, confidant and associate of Konrad Duden. Prussian rules hardly differed from the Bavarian ones. In the same year, Konrad Düden published, based on Prussian and Bavarian rules, The Complete Spelling Dictionary of the German Language, containing about 27 thousand words. Within ten years, the dictionary was distributed first in Germany, and then in all German-speaking countries for teaching in schools. In 1892 Duden was introduced as the official dictionary of Switzerland.
Konrad Duden.
In 1898, at a conference of German scientists and theater directors, uniform rules for the pronunciation of literary German were adopted. The pronunciation - Bühnenaussprache, developed by the professor of German literature from Breslau (now the Polish city of Wroclaw) Theodor Sibs, was taken as the standard. This is a completely artificial norm. There was no such oral tradition in any of the Germanic dialects. This pronunciation gravitated towards the pronunciation common in the North German regions, where Upper German was essentially a foreign language and was encountered only in writing and official speech. Native to the inhabitants of North Germany in the 19th century were the Lower German dialects.
Initially, Bühnenaussprache became the standard pronunciation on all German theater stages. Subsequently, it began to be viewed as a general prescriptive norm, despite differing pronunciation traditions, especially in the Upper German-speaking regions. Today, all media use this standard and it is understood in all German-speaking areas.
The decisions of the II spelling conference during 1902 were implemented by the governments of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The German Kaiser Wilhelm II was initially their staunch opponent. Nevertheless, in December 1902, he agreed to their introduction. Wilhelm himself mastered the new rules only by 1911, before that documents were prepared for him in the old-fashioned way.
At the moment, the standard German state language in Liechtenstein, one of the state languages in Germany (along with Danish, Frisian and Sorbian), in Austria (along with Slovenian, Croatian and Hungarian), Switzerland (along with French, Italian and Romansh), Belgium (together with Dutch and French) and Luxembourg (together with French and Luxembourgish). It is the official regional language in South Tyrol (Italy), the cities of Sopron (Hungary), Kraul (Slovakia) and several cities in Romania and some provinces in Denmark and Namibia. Standard German is the official language of the command of the Swiss guards at the Vatican.
In everyday communication, Hochdeutsch has supplanted traditional dialets in vast areas of Northern Germany and in large cities in other parts of the country. Standard German differs from region to region. But the regional variants of Standard German should not be confused with the local dialects.
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